


The Demon's Price

by yhlee (etothey)



Category: Demon's Lexicon - Sarah Rees Brennan
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-30
Updated: 2010-11-30
Packaged: 2017-10-13 11:31:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/136881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/yhlee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick, Alan, Mae, and Jamie have one more dinner together; the importance of pie.  Takes place between Demon's Lexicon and Demon's Covenant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Demon's Price

**Author's Note:**

  * For [innocentsmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/innocentsmith/gifts).



Nick did not like the sitting room. He hadn't liked it when they first moved in, either. It had pretensions to a sort of homey comfortableness, and it was decorated with insipid cross-stitched cushions with highlights picked out in scratchy gold thread. The lamps had glittery beaded fringes. Mae had, in an attempt to make the hominess more real, put freshly-picked flowers in the bud vase. Alan had smiled brilliantly at her, and he and Mae had chattered about the language of flowers. Nick had rolled his eyes at the time, but all things considered, chaperoning a discussion of pointless botanical codes was much to be preferred to babysitting.

"It doesn't make any sense," Nick had complained when Alan explained the plan for dinner under the guise of asking him to tune up the car. "You can't hide the fact that you're baking pies."

"Well," Alan said wickedly, "we could have a bake-off instead. I'm sure they'd be love to cheer you on."

Nick tried to imagine Mae singing praises to his pastry cutter technique and scowled.

"Anyhow, that's where you come in," Alan said, his voice warm and conspiratorial. "Keep them occupied, and exert yourself a little in making sure the tantalizing smell of pie doesn't waft out of the kitchen."

"Why not just tell them you want to bake?"

"They'll enjoy the surprise, trust me."

"I make better crusts than you do," Nick pointed out. " _You_ could entertain them while I do the dirty work."

"You've hardly spoken to them at all since we cleared up that business with the magicians," Alan said. His eyes were a little sad. "They'll want to spend some time with you before we take them home tomorrow."

Nick thought of Jamie, who still flinched sometimes when Nick looked at him hard, and fierce, brave, impatient Mae, and wasn't sure he saw it at all. But Alan was undoubtedly right, all the same. And so he had found himself with the task of keeping the two entertained.

His first few attempts at a conversation, which could only be called "attempts" by a very charitable observer, had not gone well. Jamie had said, in a faltering voice, that he would be surprised if their mother had noticed their absence at all. Mae had hissed at him to shut up, evidently thinking that mothers were a forbidden topic, and they had lapsed back into a glum silence.

"Maybe I should go see what Alan's up to," Jamie announced after the latest awkward silence.

"No," Nick said firmly.

Mae and Jamie stared at him. It was impossible not to see the family resemblance between them when they did that.

Nick frowned. It was one thing to think quickly in battle, with steel singing in your hands, and quite another to come up with a plan that depended on people talking at each other. But he did remember something in one of the closets, which the previous tenants must have abandoned. "Let's play a game."

"What kind of game?" Jamie asked, trying not to sound wary and not really succeeding. "Darts? Because you should know in advance, I'm kind of a menace with darts and not in the good way--"

"There are board games in the hallway closet," Nick said.

"I didn't know you liked games," Mae said.

Since saying that he didn't would ruin his gambit, Nick shrugged. He remembered putting his Scrabble tiles in alphabetical order and glaring at them obstinately when Alan had made him play, long ago, on the grounds that it would encourage Nick's use of language. Despite Alan's efforts, Nick had never been any good at making words.

Nick didn't want to go get the games himself, because that would mean letting Mae and Jamie out of his sight. So he said, "Why don't you go pick something you like?"

"Sure!" Jamie said, almost a chirrup, and went to fetch the games.

Mae hadn't moved. "You're up to something," she said.

Glaring at her wasn't going to work. "It's for your own good," Nick said, then realized she might think that Nick was covering for Alan doing some convoluted magical protection thing. For all Nick knew, the whole obsession with a perfect family dinner ending in pie _was_ cover for a convoluted magical protection thing.

"Hey," Mae said. "The magicians won't be after us yet. But it's nice of you guys to worry."

"It's not going to be that easy," Nick said unpromisingly.

Just then, Jamie returned with a cobweb clinging to his trousers and a tattered cardboard box, taped together at the edges with both duct tape and electrician's tape. It was the one game that Nick had taken an instant dislike to, because it had a faded picture of two magicians hurling black lightning at each other, and spidery dark symbols that were probably supposed to be magical. Maybe Alan would have recognized the alphabet.

"I've never seen this one," Mae said, leaning forward. "It's not--it's not magical, is it?"

Nick snorted. "It's about as magical as your shoes."

Mae just grinned at him, slow and saucy. "I'll have you know my shoes are _very_ magical."

Jamie opened up the box. The pieces were scattered inside, little metal figurines with bland shapeless faces and flimsy cards with more of the spidery symbols and plastic coins stamped with Roman numerals. Nick tipped his gaze up from the box to Jamie's crestfallen face.

"The board's missing," Mae said, reading the list of pieces. "Oh, that's a shame." She squeezed Jamie's shoulder, which he seemed to think was an appropriate response.

"I used to dream about what it might be like, you know," Jamie said. "Making beautiful things happen with magic, snow in the summer and rainbows in glass, except without the bit where you feed people to demons."

"You can't do that." Nick's voice was harsh. They startled, Mae moving as if to shield her brother. "You always have to pay. That's the point."

Nick had always known that magic was the thing that you couldn't escape paying, and for a long time he had believed that he knew this because Alan had taught him. But that wasn't how it was.

Mae's mouth was compressed. It took him a second to work out that she thought he had hurt her brother. Jamie himself was smiling in that shaky way that fooled no one.

"I know," Mae said, evidently determined to get past the moment. "We'll make up our own rules."

Nick regarded her with dismay. He had spent his childhood ignoring toys because he couldn't see the point in fake, nonfunctional things. Being tortured would have been preferable to improvising a game. At least torture was a straightforward transaction.

Jamie snatched up one of the metal figures and held it up. "They look kind of pasty to be toy soldiers," he remarked. "But we could make it work."

Nick didn't understand the point of playing at soldiers when you could always get yourself a knife and practice throwing it. He picked up one of the figures at random.

Mae snickered. "That one's a girl, Nick."

"You're just sorry I'm hotter than you when I'm in drag," Nick said. "Actually, I'm always hotter than you."

Mae made a show of yawning. "Yes, but are you any good at putting on mascara?"

While Nick and Mae sniped at each other, falling into an easy rhythm of insults, Jamie spun them a story about a plucky band of adventurers out to save the world from magicians. Nick had known that the magicians were going to come for them. He just hadn't expected that they'd sneak in through the back door like this. It seemed rather unfair.

They were busy rolling dice to determine the outcome of what Jamie assured him was an epic battle between someone named Sauron and the plucky adventurers when Nick heard Alan limping out of the kitchen. Jamie was becoming increasingly creative in interpreting the dice results.

Nick left Jamie and Mae arguing over whether a skillet or a tree branch made a deadlier weapon, and went into the kitchen. He could smell the feast that Alan had prepared, pot roast and curried onions and a salad and pies: berry pie and apple pie and chocolate pie. "You," he said to Alan.

Alan was smiling dazzlingly, which probably meant he was in terrible pain.

"Our guests were so distraught by your reclusiveness that the invented a game," Nick informed him. "And they made me play it."

Alan laughed. "You never showed much interest in board games," he said. "You lost interest in chess pretty quickly once we left the war metaphor behind."

"Can I let go of this spell now?" Nick said. "They're going to think it's a magical attack when they're suddenly bombarded with all these aromas."

"I think they'll forgive us," Alan said.

Nick pointed at a chair. "Sit. You could have asked me to help set the table, you know."

"You sounded like you were having such a delightful conversation, I couldn't bring myself to interrupt."

Nick harrumphed and dropped the spell. It fell away with hardly any fuss, and suddenly the house smelled enticingly of dinner and pie.

Mae poked her head in. "Alan!" she said. She beamed at him. "I didn't--you could have asked us to--"

"I remember what happened the last time Jamie went near a vegetable peeler," Nick said. "No thanks."

"It had to be a surprise," Alan said. His smile almost hid the lines of pain around his mouth. "Sit down and let's eat. And maybe afterwards I can see what you've done with that game?"

Jamie drifted into the kitchen. "We'll have much better luck vanquishing Sauron with your help," he assured Alan.

"Next time you want to fool around with pies for people, let's just do the bake-off," Nick said. "It will be your most delicious defeat."

Alan's smile changed, became softer and sharper and more real, all at once. "I will," he said.

They sat down to eat, and even Nick had to concede that the pies were excellent. He didn't like the fact that Alan was in pain, but this whole ridiculous episode had made Alan happy, and there needed to be more of that in the world.

You had to pay for magic, no matter how beautiful it was. You had to pay for people, too, the ones that mattered to you, to get them to stay in your life. But Nick looked at his brother, drowsy and content as he polished off a slice of pie, and rather thought he didn't mind the price.


End file.
